To raise an Ebeneezer.

All this talk about housing was starting to make me nervous. I was starting to worry if timing would work out. I was worried I might not have a place to live for a while. Then I looked down at my key chain. Sitting there, beside my car keys and work keys was a key that doesn't unlock anything anymore. That key is my Ebeneezer.

In 1 Samuel 7 the Lord has just protected Israel from an invasion of the Philistines. It was one of those battles Israel fought that they didn't actually have to bare arms in because the Lord sent thunder and the enemy was too confused to fight.

"12Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer,^b saying, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.”

1 Samual 7:12

I've been encouraged to remember the ways that God has been faithful in the past when I'm tempted to worry. This key used to go to the door of a dear friend's house. She was 42 and had befriended a socially awkward college student, me, to help teach me what it meant to grow into a woman of God. 

Then two weeks before graduation when I was jobless and had nowhere to live in DC. She invited me to live in their basement for the summer. Then, by God's kindness he provided two more short term housing situations with friends from church before I finally found  a job eight months later. 

Four years later, many things have changed. That friend is now with her savior and not with us anymore. I have a job that I love. The credit cards are paid off, and I'm looking to buy a couch for a house instead of couch surf. But, even though my circumstances have changed, my God is still the same. The same God who delivered Samuel from the hands of the Philistines, is the same God who provided a place for me to live after college, and he's the same God that is carefully and lovingly executing the next steps of his good and perfect plan. I can rest knowing that God will provide for me. I can wait with confidence that God will be glorified.